Lighting Tutorial - Fortune Teller shoot

This is the first in what will hopefully be a long series of tutorials I’ll be posting on how I’ve achieved the effects I have in some of my shoots.  The subject for today is one of the more creative setups I’ve come up with.  It’s the kind of setup that you run over in your mind and are never sure if it’ll work until you give it a go…First up here are a couple of the shots I took with the setup:

Now there’s not as much photoshop done to these images as you might first think.  Just some local contrast adjustment and colour tweaking, that’s it.  The effect was achieved by the use of 3 strobes.  The first two were standard rim lights set up behind and to each side of the model to provide separation between her and the black background.  The third was the creative one, I actually had it shining up from the bottom through the crystal ball.

The setup was as follows:  I started with a small round glass table & used cloth to mask off around the edges and even most of the table top, just leaving a circle in the middle, the strobe was placed under the table and faced upward so that it would fire through that circle and not spill anywhere else.  I then got a large glass bowl and a drinking glass both of the same height & placed the drinking glass in the bowl and the crystal ball on the glass.  I then filled up the bowl with hot water and dropped some dry ice in the bowl of water for the smoke.  The result being that with the smoke flowing out of the bowl of water and the crystal ball being of the same height of the bowl that the ball appears to be floating on smoke, with light coming from underneath through the table, bowl, glass and finally crystal ball to illuminate the smoke & the models hands and face.

I wasn’t sure it would work before we tried it but couldn’t have been happier with the results.  Often when you try playing around with ideas like this (and even less adventurous) some little thing you never figured on ruins everything and you have to play around a lot to get something decent out of the setup.  This was one of the rare experiments that just WORKED, straight up.

An afternoon with Soph - 15th June 2008

I always grab every oppurtunity I can to work with Soph and so when she was up in Brisbane recently for a few days of work I did just that.  We had some makeup artist issues with a late cancelation but Carla came to the party and all ended well.  After we finished up with the car shots we filled ourselves up with an awesome homecooked meal (thanks Anne!).  The goal for the evening then was just to fit in a bunch of different beauty looks in a fairly short shoot (about 3hrs from makeup start to last shot).

 Model : Soph
Make up : Carla

 

 

 

 

 

Silver Soph - 15th August 2007

Well it’s still a couple weeks until I start traveling and using this blog for its intended purpose so I figure I may as well throw in a few shots here and there as I get them edited.  Here are a couple pics from a shoot I did about a year ago with the scrabble genius Soph (yeah it’s taken me this long to get them edited - I’m slack ok?)

The setup for this shoot was an overhead bar above and behind Soph with two large pieces of silver sheer cloth hanging from it and a black backdrop behind them.  Lighting was 3 strobes in total, one to each side of and behind Soph (bare bulb) and another in front of her, a bit higher than head height firing through a snoot aimed at her face/upper torso.  It was then a matter of playing with some big industrial fans that were set up, one behind the material blowing it forward and some smaller, non pedestal units in front of Soph blowing up.

Model = Soph 

Makeup = Danielle